Yes, I’m still alive. No, I haven’t posted in over a year. Yes, I’m still working for a large live entertainment company.

A quick update, the earlier calculator scripts that I mentioned in the last few posts are no longer working. I’ve instead been working on a unified collection of calculators using the jquery mobile framework; the aim is to be phone and tablet friendly. Catch it in the links above, or here.

My two favorites are the Unit Converter and the HP/Force/Speed estimator. I’ll be adding more as I find the time.

I’ve been playing around with learning javascript recently. I’ve thrown together a fluid power calculator as a “hello world”. You can find it here: Fluid Power Calculator It’s not pretty, but it works pretty well. (See what I did there?) You can download the page and run it locally if you want.

My ultimate goal is to transfer all of my theatre-related excel calculators to javascript powered web pages, so I can access them wherever I happen to be.

Hard to believe its been over a year since I released an update to Scratch. This update is kind of a sea change for the program, see the notes below. On another note, this is the last release I am going to issue; I use it every day, and it hasn’t been an active development project for a while. I might post a short screencast describing how to use it. I hope you get as much use out of it as I have. And be forewarned, I’ve got some really cool stuff I’ve been working on.

I’ve decided to do away with the scenic-shop wiki. I’ve little patience for cleaning up the spam and junk that kept accumulating. It was quite the failed experiment in any case; I’m both disappointed and frustrated with the outcome. This makes two failed attempts at starting up an open forum for technical theatre solutions. Why the failure? 1) Perhaps writing for a wiki format is too challenging or takes too long; though I would describe very few of the successful stagehands I know as slow – so that’s probably not the reason. 2) Perhaps folks don’t want to publish technical solutions without a byline to claim credit. 3) Maybe we’re much more secretive and feudal than I thought. 4) Maybe our free time should be spent drinking beer and eating nachos. Whatever the reason, there’s still the stagecraft mailing list, yale tech shorts (see what I did there?), Google Groups and the Technical Director’s forum.

I hope I don’t sound bitter, that’s not what I’m going for at all. I’m still convinced that there’s a way to implement a community driven reference site, I just don’t know what shape it will take.